The smile

One lazy afternoon on a summer day, he was burning with the passion that overcomes young boys coming of age. His cousin told him on the roof of his house that man's fate was to find the woman, who was made from a rib taken from his chest. But he never thought it was going to be like this, finding his woman in a restaurant where he was waiting to eat. His chest swelled with a spurt of joy as if his ribs were glad to find their long lost friend. God works in mysterious ways, he thought, and took a deep breath.

He looked again and she smiled again, pouting her lips in a luscious manner that could send a thousand men to their deaths. In his long years if he had learned one thing about women, it was that the mystery of the universe was hidden in them. Their eyes held the depth of oceans, their glances dwarfed many mountains. Their lips carried nectar of fruits, breath reeking with fragrance of rose. Their voice lilted the music of flutes, laughter resounded shattering glasses. Their smile shone like a beaming sun, their tears flowed like surging tides. Dark clouds floated in their hairs, a thousand galaxies roamed their minds. When they speak, look, sing, smile, weep, love and hate, nature sets in motion to destroy and create.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

She waived at the waiter and said something to him, and then looked straight in the direction of where he was sitting. For a moment he thought a sharp knife had just gone through his heart, realizing how he was unprepared to look a woman in the eye. She smiled again, and swayed her head from side to side to the rhythm of music playing inside the room. He didn't know what to do or say. For a while he thought he should walk up to her and start a conversation.

Just then a second thought crossed his mind. The heart of a woman has the strength of a dense forest. One could never claim to see it through from end to end. Who was she and why she should take interest in him? He tried to remember if he had met her before. Could she be one of his distant relatives, whom he hadn't seen since she was a kid? It happened to one of his friends who made a pass at a steaming beauty in a shopping mall, and came home to find that the girl was his niece from a distant cousin.

Relationship defies the law of mathematics when multiplications diminish familiarity and create strangers amongst kith and kin. He grew up in the solitude of an immense house, which swarmed with people, relatives, visitors, and servants until they all vanished, one by one, in the stretch of life, to get married, to find jobs, to raise families. She was now looking bored, her lower lip curved over the upper lip, blowing air into the bangs of hair hanging over her forehead. When he looked again, she smacked her lips as if to announce that she wasn't getting enough attention from him.

But he wished to think a little longer, wondering how a crowd could become the loneliest place on earth, remembering how he grew up unnoticed and ignored, craving for attention in a house full of loved ones. Loneliness arouses a terrible hunger, seething in the veins with a raging void, hurting like a napalm bomb that sucks out the air before burning everything within its pocket.

A man is aroused when he is either full or empty. It comes to him after a good meal, when he is wined and dined, when he is content and life feels like a breeze in the spring. But it also comes to him in the midst of worries, when he is afraid and anxious, when he feels desolate, abandoned and challenged. Players feel it before a game, soldiers feel it before they go to war, and vagabonds feel it every time they realise that they have nothing left to lose.

The woman was pulling a long face now, her head lowered in a gaze fixed on the table. Glory of creation! He thought again. If men were wax, women were fire. If men were steel, women were magnet. If men were flies, women were flames. Flesh to flesh, yet the mystery of the universe transpired between them. It was his turn now, to meet his woman, raise a family, and perpetuate that mystery in the cycle of life and death.

For a long time the woman didn't raise her eyes and quietly ate the food served to her. Meanwhile, the waiter had also laid out his lunch when he waited for her to lift her face and look at him again. Suddenly he felt annoyed lest she thought he would like to become a plaything to her! Then he knew that women were unpredictable. What they showed wasn't always what they meant. Perhaps it was her revenge for the time he spent thinking and not paying attention to her.

It occurred to him that this was part of that same mystery, which was chasing its logical conclusion in the fatal attraction between man and woman. Life was nothing but a relay race, passing from father to son conceived in the wombs of women who came as mothers, who came as wives. It was destiny that made things happen, whereas love, sex, and marriage were mere excuses to bring two bodies into predetermined union.

His heart was about to explode when she finally raised her head and looked towards him. But this time she wasn't making any eye contact with him, her face heavy as the laden sky before monsoon rain. He smiled at her, but she looked away, and it amused him to think that the wrath of a woman could make her silly. He smiled again, she looked away again, her eyes going over his head as if she was looking for someone, who was sitting behind him.

The blood was beginning to boil inside him. Why did he have to meet this woman inside this restaurant where he had come for no other business but to eat one meal? Why did she have to smile at him, and why did he have to believe that she was smiling at him on this day which was not different from any other day?

The ribs in his chest started to ache as if they felt cheated by one of them. Before he knew what happened, she sprang up on her feet and ran towards the door. By the time he turned around to look where she was going, she had disappeared into the belly of a car which sped away in the blink of an eye and vanished into the traffic on the road.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.